Posted by Michael Hardiman on November 5, 2009, 19:38:52, in reply to "Re: Anti-Christ"
Finn, I liked the thing you wrote initially and I translated it into portuguese and sent it to my wife Elisenda. It's not that we don't talk but with three kids conversations tend to get cut off. She replied to what you said in your first post and sent me another mail which I have translated to english, with some difficulty, and am posting now. Any errors or vagueness are my fault.
I liked that Guy(Finn).
I confess that I had already realized the madness in the husband and I think He wanted to bring her to a breakdown which culminated in the events at the end of the film. In truth the film shows us two mad nesses, the guilt originating from the death of the child and the controlled madness that exists within us all. The first is innate to parents because they feel that they are causes of everything that happens to their children. The second, the madness of being human, which is camouflaged by “humanity”; therefore when we Begin to speak and later adapt to nature we are convinced of the fact that we could be gods and from that are assaulted by moral limits, social limits, religious limits and judicial limits.
Have you stopped to think that we live so bounded that we don’t even know what being human is or isn’t?
I think that Von Trier wanted to show how an event can unravel and cause the masks of those involved to fall off.
She, for example, showed her madness in her abuse of the child and her breakdown regarding feminine sadism. The author of the story shows someone reading up on evil (which has little meaning) sees herself and then something really inhuman happens in that person’s life which makes her lose her references and while lost she returns to the most animalistic part of herself, the mad limitless part which neither judges nor compares, which only feels compelled to auto-flagellate and be sadist and which deep down thinks that she deserves all the punishment in the world, a world which she wished to leave because she no longer wishes to live by his rules.
He, the husband, I think he is mad because being a therapist he has access to the madness of others and all the excuses and guilt complexes that these people reveal under analysis...a madman narrating his own madness must be the strangest point of view.
And so, the husband, (I think) already knew of the madness in his wife and suspected and suspected abuse of the child...children know without seeking how to communicate that something is wrong….and him a therapist didn’t suspect??
I think He was the villain of the piece, He wanted to drive his wife mad to prove to himself that it was the wife Who was mad and not him, I think they both blame themselves tôo much and this is the madness within the film – He enjoyed forcing her to stop taking medicine and face her fears and that is where being hurt coincides for both of them, a mutual desire to be punished.
They didn’t love each other but one was a limit for the madness in the other and that was what attracted both to the abyss.
Imagine two people looking into an abyss and being attracted by it but each one knows that the resistance of the other will cause their own resistance and they stay there on the edge deciding whether to look up or down. Imagine they both arrive at the same common denominator and decide that the other deserves to fall into the abyss and feel that this must happen and fixate on this in such a way that a fight begins between throwing the other into the abyss or living with the other who should no longer be allowed to live.
Madness is like passion and some people throw themselves headfirst into it and when they discover that the shadow of the thing on the wall isn’t caused by the light of the Sun the improbable happens, the person reboots and the individual story within us all asserts itself. Confused ???? Me ???
Elisenda von Hardiman
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